Iran Elections

June 10, 2009 | Hooman Majd, Hooman Majd is a New York-based writer and journalist and the author of "The Ayatollah Begs to Differ."

On a late-April trip to Iran, I had a hard time getting people to talk about the country's looming presidential race. My questions about the election, to be held Friday, were dismissed as irrelevant in a nation of apathetic voters who knew that real power was vested not in the president but in Iran's unelected supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a handful of clerics. Most of the people I spoke to seemed resigned to the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran's former president, Mohammad Khatami, a moderate, announced Sunday that he would run against incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a critical election in June that is shaping up as a referendum on the performance of the current conservative government. After months of whispers about a possible run, Khatami's move is sure to bolster turnout in a contest that most analysts see as coming at a crucial juncture for the Islamic Republic and its relations with the outside world.

Iran's parliamentary elections Friday turned into an internal battle between political hard-liners who support the populism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and those who blame him for policies that have led to high inflation, unemployment and fuel shortages. The vote was also expected to further marginalize reformists, hundreds of whom were barred from the ballot for their political views by clerics and jurists in the Guardian Council.

January 25, 2008 | Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi, Special to The Times

Moderate Iranian politicians barred from participating in upcoming parliamentary elections vowed Thursday to fight the disqualifications and threatened to boycott the vote. Iranian authorities this week barred nearly one-third of the 7,240 candidates who had applied to run in March 14 legislative elections. Officials said some of those disqualified were involved in embezzlement or fraud, sympathized with terrorist groups or had a "tendency toward perverted cults."

Austrian prosecutors have launched an investigation into whether Iran's president-elect was involved in the 1989 assassination of a Kurdish leader in Vienna, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday. Ministry spokesman Rudolf Gollia declined to provide any details. The state prosecutor's office also confirmed that it was reopening the unsolved murder case. Tehran reacted angrily, saying that its Foreign Ministry had summoned the Austrian ambassador to demand an explanation.

Many Iranian emigres on Saturday said they were stunned by the landslide election of a hard-liner as president of Iran and worried that it would exacerbate tensions with the United States and roll back reforms that had eased the lives of their relatives and friends back home.

The mayor of Tehran won Iran's presidency in a landslide Friday, using support from the clerical hierarchy and the country's vast military to restore total control of the government to Islamic fundamentalists and end an eight-year experiment in reform. Partial returns released by the official news agency early today gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a political newcomer, more than 61% of the vote in his runoff contest with former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

A day before an unpredictable presidential runoff election, Iran said Thursday that it had arrested 26 people, including at least one military figure, for suspected violations in the first round of voting. The arrests appeared to lend credence to reformist charges of fraud in the inconclusive June 17 vote. The reformists question a late surge in support that took hard-line Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into Friday's runoff.

Re "Reformers Dispute Iran's Vote Results," June 19: President Bush is complaining about the elections and leadership in Iran because, he says, "Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror abroad." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the election was illegitimate because ultraconservatives corrupted the process through voter fraud and by suppressing some of the vote illegally. I guess I'm confused. This differs from the United States how? Sounds to me like the Patriot Act, the illegal invasion of Iraq and the 2004 American presidential elections.

Defeated in an election widely denounced as undemocratic, Iran's reformers vented their frustration in a rowdy parliament session Monday. State media, meanwhile, reported that eight people died over the weekend in protests against the vote. European and American officials also voiced their disappointment with Friday's vote, in which conservatives wrested control of the 290-seat parliament from reformists.